Another week and another question posed by our professor: what
are the pros and cons that you think Wiki may bring to enriching adult
learners' learning experience?
To begin with, I have never created my own Wiki but I have
worked with Wikis in an education setting. My last position in the military
before retiring was as a Marine Officer Instructor (MOI) at a university ROTC.
There are approximately 60 MOI’s at major universities across the country and
we all teach the same three classes (two history and one leadership) and well
as prepare student midshipmen (lots of short classes on orders, land navigation, basic
military skills, etc.) for Officer Candidate School and The Basic School. As a
course coordinator for one of the history classes (Evolution of Warfare), I
needed to be able to collaborate with all of the other instructors across the
country on the course curriculum, content and changes, etc. We used a Wiki (set
up by my predecessor) to share documents, class presentations, articles, media,
test question bank as well as a host of other documents and orders that we
needed to have access to to be able to do our job. We used a pay Wiki source
since we wanted extra space and security; the Wiki was setup to allow four (the
three course coordinators and one administrator) of us complete access to the
site as well as the ability to grant access to new members. The main areas of
the site were accessible by everyone with a password and certain parts of the
site were read only (to ensure no important documents were changed, deleted or access
granted to unauthorized people.
In the Professor’s Guide to Taming Technology (King and Cox,
2011), it talks about the “use of wikis in group work and collaboration assists
in sharing knowledge and increases knowledge and expertise among the community
of practice.” I whole heartedly agree; when the MOIs shared their class
presentations and lessons learned on the wiki for everyone to use/edit/cut, we
increased our collective knowledge and expertise by drawing from the talent and
experience of 60 different Marine officers who were all working towards the
same goal – teaching quality courses and helping to make future Marine Officers. When it came time to
graduate and commission our students, the MOIs all had to turn in the same commissioning
documents for our students to Headquarters Marine Corps; we would put one source
document on the wiki site that everyone edited till we had a final version we
could all use (saved so much time vs. the typical email train). The ability to
share our experience and “stuff” (documents, instructions, orders, media,
classes, best practices, lessons learned, etc.) made us better and more efficient
Instructors. Our shared MOI wiki site, without doubt, made us better learners
and educators.
With all that said, let’s get to the pros and cons:
Pros
- Ease of Collaboration (read/write/edit a project in real
time)
- Sharing experience, media, documents, etc.
- Easy to learn and use (at least the basics)
- Knowledge building
Cons
- Unless protected (usually pay service), anyone can
write/edit
- Other security concerns of an open source site
- Possible collective/group bias (King and Cox, 2009)
- Free hosting sites will likely have advertising on the
wiki page
I highlighted what I thought the major pro and con were. In my opinion, when you have a colaborative or group project to work on, a wiki is the way to go.
King, K. & Cox, T. (2011). The Professor’s Guide to
Taming Technology. Charlotte ,
NC
Dean, what a great example of using wiki for collaboration, social learning, and building community. You also explained how the wiki reduced your work load thereby increasing your motivation to participate in the community of practice. I am on a constructivist theory kick this term and you articulated the concepts well in your post. Hazari, North, and Moreland(2009) describe web 2.0 tools as a "media convergence that has created a new culture, termed collective intelligence (p. 3)." It sounds like you and your colleagues created a "participatory community" in order to pool "collective knowledge" and compare "collective intelligence" taking all of you to another level of learning through "scaffolding."
ReplyDeleteHazari, S.; North, A.; Moreland, D. (2009). Investigating Pedagogical Value of Wiki Technology. Journal of Information Sysems Education, 20.2, 187-198.
Dean,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your experience with using a wiki. There are so many useful ways to put a wiki site to use for collaboration! I know we have been looking for ways to step up some training information for other agencies that work with our task force, and I think that I might have to explore a more secure wiki for this. May I ask what service you were using? Also I see that you mention storage space issues being another reason that lead to using a pay wiki, which is a point that was also brought up by West (p. 14) as important to remember. Did you ever notice download speeds being an issue with the service you chose? While it sounds as if most of what you were sharing were documents, etc., I can see where checking the speed of upload/downloads might be important if the group is sharing/editing large files.
You also brought up an excellent point that I had not thought of when you mention not having the normal "email train" when it came to the project. That there is worth the effort of setting up a wiki for a group project!
Shawn
Shawn,
DeleteWe used PBworks to host the wiki site. I never had a problem downloading or uploading and some of the class presentation files were fairly large.
Dean
Dean,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your through description of how you used wikis in your military setting. But, I have a question. Did you actually edit each other’s documents to create communal documents? It sounded like the wiki was more of a collection location for the curriculum and documents of all the instructors. I think one thing that you played down was the collaborative effort that you did. I pretty sure, that that you probably did collaborate and created shared documents, like the commissioning documents.
One difficulty of the doing wikis for me, is managing the group dynamic of how to work together to create the assignment that is required. It is tension of wanting to take charge but afraid I will be a tyrant and overly bossy and being anxious to wait for someone else to lead and take charge. I bet with the lines of command in the military, you did not have this trouble. Any suggestions on how to overcome my anxiety about the group dynamics of working on the wiki?
Dawn,
DeleteWe would have one master commissioning document and make changes as needed and then we would all download the document to fill-in the names and personal info.
Haha, groups can be even worse in military settings where you have a bunch of type A personalties as peers; its different if there are different ranks and one person in charge.
I found the best way to overcome some of the anxiety is by getting to know the group members better and talking on the phone (conference call/wimba) where typed words will not be taken out of context.
Dean